Education isn’t a one-size fits all endeavor, and below are two articles that address this. Many students aren’t mature enough for college at age 18. So college may not be for everyone all at the same time. This is why I’m opposed to hastening students placement in college when they don’t have the maturity or the experience in life that some of their counterparts in Singapore and Finland may have. Some successful people choose to work right after school and go to college later, which gives them time to gain confidence and motivation for why they want a college education.

We have to understand some of the complexities of students today. Some are able and ready to go to college at age eighteen. Some can benefit from work or the service to expand their ability to know themselves and persist. Others are academically ready for college, but not be emotionally or socially ready to make valuable connections once they get there.

Our stair-step programs help students in middle school and high school prepare for these transitions. Even with the benefit of these transition and self-awareness programs, it simply takes some students longer than others and they need not feel like second class citizens while they are “growing up” academically, emotionally and socially. We need to place as much emphasis on experience in the world as we do in-class learning.

ARTICLES

WATERLOO, Wis. — Debbie Crave once assumed that all of her children would go to college. Then she had kids.

Son Patrick is a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Debbie’s alma mater, and plans to one day help manage the family’s 1,700-acre, 1,000-cow dairy farm here.

Brian, 17, would rather sit atop a tractor than behind a desk. “He’s been afraid we might push him” to go to college, his mother says. But her eyes have been opened: “Kids learn differently, and some just aren’t college material.”

Long before President Obama vowed last year that America will “have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world” by 2020, the premium placed on going to college was firmly embedded in the American psyche.